Strangeness blooms

This is it! Only a few weeks remain until Moon­bound’s launch.

Here’s me and the book, ready to go.

Thanks to everyone who has pre­ordered, and espe­cially to everyone who also for­warded their order con­fir­ma­tion email to pre­order@robinsloan.com.

Remember, I’ve printed a passel of limited-edition zines, which I’ll soon mail to those pre­order-ers who have made them­selves known.

This zine was a Riso­graph pro­duc­tion, naturally. I love using the Riso — the electro­mechan­ical beep and whirr, the dis­tinct layers of ink.

One side of the 11×17″ print is actu­ally a poster — 

—and it turned out so beau­ti­fully that I am almost sorry to fold it for mailing!

(Not really, though. I know I’m not alone in having ordered many lovely, “precious” prints from the internet … only to have them sit in a stack. I like the vibe, instead, of a low-fuss pro­duc­tion tacked to the wall for a season, or stuck to the fridge, then hap­pily composted.)

(That said: I printed a couple hun­dred extra of this poster side, which I might offer as a proper pur­chase some­time in the future. Mailing over­size pages flat and safe is, unfortunately, a bit pricy.)

As for the zine’s reverse side … 

 … ya gotta pre­order to see that! It is a sort of char­cu­terie plate of world­building material, including an early look at the fic­tional script I designed for this book. (More on that in the next edition.)

You can pre­order from your local book­store, or a book­store sug­gested on my Moon­bound home page, or an online retailer:

• Bookshop
• Barnes & Noble
• Amazon

For­ward your order con­fir­ma­tion email to pre­order@robinsloan.com and I’ll mail you one of these zines for your wall, fridge, and/or library.

The tour

I’m hit­ting the road for Moon­bound! Here’s my schedule:

June 10: Green Apple Books on the Park, San Fran­cisco

June 12: Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park, Wash­ington

June 13: Mrs. Dalloway’s, Berkeley, Cal­i­fornia

June 15: McIntyre’s Books, Pittsboro, North Car­olina

June 17: Greenlight Bookstore, Brooklyn, New York

June 18: Magic City Books, Tulsa, Okla­homa

June 21: Copperfield’s Books, Petaluma, Cal­i­fornia

June 23: SF in SF, The Amer­ican Book­binders Museum, San Fran­cisco

June 27: Mysterious Galaxy, San Diego, Cal­i­fornia

I’ll rustle up links to all those events for my next newsletter; in the meantime, if you’re prox­i­mate to any of those book­stores, mark your calendar! I hope to see you out there.

The four weeks ahead will be, in a lot of ways, the most con­se­quen­tial of my writing career. They’ll set the whole shape of Moon­bound’s trajectory: opening up pos­si­bil­i­ties for for­eign edi­tions (or not); lighting the engines of tele­vi­sual adap­ta­tion (or not); and, most importantly, by far, deter­mining whether I can spend the next decade or so as I dream I might: con­tin­uing this series, expanding its scope, stretching to probe the limits of imagination.

That, and com­mis­sioning more maps!!

Think, friends, of the fan­tasy cartographers.

To a degree that is hon­estly improbable, this is entirely in your hands. Enough people are reading this newsletter to make Moon­bound a best­seller twice over. Those of you who have pre­ordered already: thank you. Those of you who haven’t: get in here! There’s a zine with your name on it, and a world for you (or a reader you know) to explore.

The poster side of the zine (pictured up above) shows a line from the book, set in the beau­tiful Job Clarendon by Bethany Heck and David Jonathan Ross. The line is repeated a few times in Moon­bound, but the first time, it’s Agassiz the bril­liant beaver who says it.

The talking beavers are the least of it.

From the lab:

P.S. You’ll receive my next newsletter around June 3. I’ll include a bit about my Tolkien-esque fic­tional script, as well as the Moon­bound audiobook!

May 2024